On 6/18/2011 1:05 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote:
I'm asking myself how relevant the projects I hack on are in this
context. Others probably are too. Of the stuff that didn't disappear
into the commercial void, recently it's been mostly Smalltalk for me,
and FONC is not about Smalltalk; Smalltalk is almost a footnote here,
I think.
well, I think it is not strictly about relevance, as not all projects
can be "bigger than life" or represent the distant future of computing...
Without a doubt, the only project I've worked on thus far that even
begins to scratch the surface of this subject is Cuis. I'm not a
researcher, so I'm inclined toward systems that I can use today, which
adds a bit of interesting tension to our approach. Basically it means
that I am not currently in a position to "burn the disk packs," as I
intend to make a living with those disks.
I am not a researcher either, as my main concern is also mostly stuff I
can make use of in the near term. however, it is also not really the
minimum needed to make a commercially viable product either (my projects
consistently fail to be anything I could actually reasonably ask anyone
to pay for).
my stuff is also arguably not-terribly-interesting, as most of my "core
engineering" is not too much different than what one is liable to find
in many existing commercial projects. actually, commercial projects, and
information released from commercial R&D, is often fairly informative,
and usually more along of the lines of "well this is cool, and possibly
also worth money".
the difficulty though is realizing my own somewhat finite resources, and
that I really don't have the time or ability to write out piles of code
matching both the breadth and quality of commercial efforts, and in my
past attempts at breadth, quality suffered severely, and more recently I
have been more trying to condense/streamline my efforts, such that my
stuff can hopefully at least be usable (absent recruiting a small army
of developers... and probably needing some way to pay them...).
I was recently trying also to make a 3D FPS/RPG game (currently nearly
entirely my own code, and no GPL'ed code, so I can release it as
proprietary engine), but I am left to realize that I have almost no
chance of competing with commercial studios game-wise, and my current
progress could be described mostly as "sort of like Quake, with a
fancier 3D engine, but far less functional or complete...".
and, no one is really likely to pay for fairly generic 3D engine and DCC
tools stuff, one really does need a usable game, but this requires piles
of art assets and work.
so, alas, not a lot of prospect for money here...
quick summary:
3D engine is mostly Quake-like, currently uses Quake1/2 and Valve220
maps, and a similar entity system (Quake1 maps mostly work, and thus far
have been used for testing, though "fine tuning" is needed in many places);
the scene and BSP is dynamic, and so scene geometry can be altered in
real-time (the engine does "quick and dirty" BSP rebuilds in the
background);
uses real-time dynamic lighting and stencil shadows (similar to Doom3
and Quake4, note although Source/Unreal/... also have dynamic lighting
and shadows, they use a different strategy known as shadow-mapping);
uses skeletal animation and similar (errm, like most other games over
the past decade...);
...
major drawback:
have to make nearly all of the "game content" (characters, maps, plot
events, ...) and these are not my strong areas (normally, one would have
writers and artists for this part...).
in case anyone cares, here is a video from a slightly older version:
http://cr88192.dyndns.org/run2.avi
some fixes/improvements have been made since then.
sadly, trying to "build up" leads to a lot of need to "build out" as
well, doing things like adding features, fixing bugs and logic holes, ...
So we're starting with what we've got and whittling our way down to
the smallest system that gives us the leverage that we already have. I
was surprised to find in some cases that I was able to add features
and still end up with less code than what I found when I got involved
just by refactoring as I went. It's been a wonderful meditation, a
much more intentional working style than what I experienced in industry.
sadly, I have never worked in industry...
I mostly have experience being a college student and wondering just what
the hell I might do that might actually be worth anything (WRT making a
living, ...).
The end goals, though, are similar. Personal computing in a much
smaller bag, etc. If folks took a look at
http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/Index.html
and said "yes, a note about this belongs on the FONC wiki" I would
gladly do the touch typing to make it happen.
seems probably more relevant than a lot of my stuff...
I think the nascent hardware project that seems to be emerging before
me may make interesting material for the FONC wiki, but it will be
some time before that yields anything of interest beyond discussion.
I'm doing library science right now, gathering what people before me
were able to learn. I should really add a list
possibly...
I just wrote about my stuff, which is 95% rehash of what people have
come before have done. my main thing was mostly doing my own
implementation (so I own it in a legal sense).
or such...
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